Health IT – March 2016

Happy March! Hopefully you have recovered from the transient disorientation caused by Daylight Savings on a yearly basis – here and here.

Thanks to all providers and staff that have been helpful during the Meaningful Use (MU) 2015 program year. We have successfully attested for a good amount of our providers thus far. Office of Clinical Informatics staff may be contacting clinical staff and/or providers for Medicare username and password information necessary to attest our remaining eligible providers successfully, in the weeks leading up to the deadline on March 31.

#Journey to Value – #J2V

The Alphabet Soup of Digital Health is staggering- MU, NAIP, PQRS, DSRIP, HEDIS, CQM, ICD10, PCMH, ePA, ERx! So many letters…so little collaboration. As part of institutional commitment to keep “Excellence in our DNA”, a process began to align clinical measures and provide all members of the organization with a coherent dashboard/scoreboard in order to visualize all measures in one place – centralize the data, but decentralize the reporting.

To make this a reality, recently the Office of Clinical Informatics (OCI) and the Office of Clinical Affairs (OCA) came together to align measures and create a standard message and scorecard. We plan to distribute these tools campus-wide in the near future. This underlines our dedication to collaboration and making the J2V smoother.

What does this mean for you?

The Office of Clinical Informatics, led by Alyssa Cervantes, alongside the Clinical Information Systems (CIS) group, led by Rosie Sanchez, both of who are amongst TTUHSC El Paso’s contingent in Leadership Texas, make up the Digital Health Team. The Digital Health team will be kicking off the institution-wide “Clinical Quality Measures Reporting Implementation Program” at multiple Clinical Faculty meetings over the next few months.

This will be the first steps in our J2V. They will be inviting faculty and staff to educational workshops (via WebEx and in-person). The team has been working diligently to ensure that the measurement of Clinical Quality Measures (CQMs) becomes more efficient and patient centered as we pivot to value based care. They will be distributing desktop/pocket-sized cheat sheets soon for reference, and have exciting events planned on the horizon. More information to come soon! Please feel free to contact Alyssa Cervantes (215-4326) with any questions on CQMs and our other Quality Measures Initiatives.

The J2V is happening, and we are in the midst of preparing for it!

So What’s New?

UMC CSI – The University Medical Center El Paso CSI (Cerner) project is in the “Integration Testing” phase. Our faculty and residents are working directly with UMC nursing, pharmacy and a host of other hospital groups to create test scenarios that will ensure patient data, prescriptions and orders flow seamlessly back and forth. The go-live will be August 2016. Thank you to all the faculty and residents who continue to work to ensure this project is a success.

Transmountain Campus –The Clinical Information Systems (CIS) team held the kick-off event for the TransMountain Cerner Project last month. Updates and exciting events upcoming will be presented here as we progress to the grand opening of our new clinic on the northwest side of the city.

Optimization – A new EMR (Cerner) project will not stop the host of Alberta Campus clinical systems optimization projects that are ongoing and will launch in the near future.

We are already working with Compliance and Ortho to start testing Augmedix and SkyWriter – virtual scribe products that could potentially reduce the amount of keyboard times providers have and let us interact with our patients more. Internal Medicine and Pediatrics will soon start testing AlertMD – a mobile app that allows providers to bill hospital visits on their smartphone eliminating the dreaded paper cards. We are working with CCC to improve forms and make them more streamlined.

A host of Digital Health projects are in the works. We look forward to serving you our customers, and improving the care of our patients.